I’m just coming home from a couple of days in Victoria where Caitlin and I were with colleagues Rebecca Ataya, Annemarie Travers, and Kelly Poirier. We spent two days working on what I can only call “polishing the core” of the Leadership 2020 program that we offer on behalf of the Federation of Community Social Service of BC. We have run this leadership program for 8 years now, putting around 400 people through a nine month intensive program of residential and applied learning. The program has built collaboration, trust, and connection between the Ministry of Children and Family Development, indigenous communities and organizations and people working in the social services sector.
The program has evolved with every one of the 13 cohorts that has come through. Our core team has changed and this new configuration is our latest version. We are playing with a new set of constraints and ideas as we take the core need and purpose of the program and discover other ways we can offer it to meet the demand in the sector for leadership training that strengthens resilience, creativity, and the ability to thrive in complexity.
When we arrived on Thursday morning to begin our work, we had no agenda on tap, but instead had a compelling need. We started talking and discovered the path as we went being very careful to harvest. Our insights emerged in very deliberate conversation. As skilled dialogue facilitators, we are also skilled dialogue practitioners and we have a refined practice of hosting and harvesting our own work. When we get in flow, it feels like ceremony. With attention to a practice, working this way is extremely productive. Here are a few principles that I observed in working this way:
- Tend to relationships. As we were both building a new team and developing new ideas and products for our work, the most important focus in on relationships. We always build in social time in our work, and enjoyed a nice dinner out at 10 acres bistro, an excellent local foods restaurant in Victoria.
- Nourish bodies and minds. Working like this is physically and mentally draining, and we are very careful to nourish each there when we are working. This meant good snacks (bananas, nuts, and chocolate), ample time for tea and coffee breaks, a lovely prepared lunch by Rebecca and physical breaks to walk, or maybe even dance to Beyonce songs a little!
- Don’t silo the conversation, but structure the harvest. Our conversation wandered from program content, to context, to history, to practicalities, to new ideas for structure. We were all over the map. But as we went, Caitlin made good use of our supply of post it notes and we harvested into the Chaordic Stepping Stone categories that we are using the structure the evolution of the program. Sometimes the best hosting is good harvesting, and Caitlin took on that role beautifully.
- Don’t control the outcome. It sounds almost absurd to think that we would have controlled the outcome. Pure dialogue is about following the energy of the conversation and seeing what emerges. There was no facilitation tool used beyond the ability to listen carefully and address the need and purpose of our work. We stumbled on many beautiful ideas over these past few days and we constantly look for ways to incorporate them in our work. This leadership program has the quality of a polished gem, reflecting years of attention to what is needed, and what is no longer needed.
- Stay with the flow until it doesn’t flow anymore. In Open Space we talk about the principle of “When it’s over it’s over” meaning that all creative work has a rhythm and flow to it. When the brains are no longer engaged and the mental and cognitive tiredness sets in, it’s time to stop. Two intense six hour days of work can produce tremendous results, but when the flow stops, there is no point forcing it. Wrap it up, make a date for some next steps and celebrate the work.
Working like this has the feeling of working with the simplest and most ancient way of talking about what to do. For tens of thousands of years, this is mostly how humans have talked about need and purpose in the world. Long before there were professional facilitators and methods for strategizing, decision making and evaluating, there was dialogue.
Sometimes all you need is a powerful need and purpose, solid relationships, a good way to listen, and time. When it takes on the feel of ceremony, you know you’re getting it right.
Some interesting links that caught my eye this week.
Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever
Leonard Susskind has linked the growth of black holes to increasing complexity. Is it true that the world is becoming more complex?
“It’s not only black hole interiors that grow with time. The space of cosmology grows with time,” he said. “I think it’s a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity. And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I don’t know the answer.”
With a Green New Deal, here’s what the world could look like for the next generation
This is the vision I have been asking for from our governments. This vision is the one that would get me on board with using our existing oil and gas resources to manufacture and fund and infrastructure to accelerate this future for my kids. The cost of increasing fossil fuel use is so high, it needs to be accompanied by a commitment to faster transition to this kind of world. Read the whole thing.
Why we suck at ‘solving wicked problems”
Sonja Blignault is one of the people in the world with whom I share the greatest overlap of theory and practice curiosities regarding complexity. I know this, because whenever she posts something on her blog I almost always find myself wishing I had written that! Here’s a great post of five things we can do to disrupt thinking about problem solving to enable us to work much better with complexity.
Money and technology are hugely valuable resources: they are certaintly necessary but they are not sufficient. Simply throwing more money and/or more advanced technology at a problem will not make it go away. We need to fundamentally change our thinking paradigm and approach things in context-appropriate ways, otherwise we will never move the needle on these so-called wicked problems.
rock/paper/scissors and beyond
I miss Bernie DeKoven. Since he died earlier this year I’ve missed seeing his poetic and playful blog posts about games and fun. Here is one from his archives about variations on rock/paper/scissors
The relationship between the two players is both playful and intimate. The contest is both strategic and arbitrary. There are rumors that some strategies actually work. Unless, of course, the players know what those strategies are. Sometimes, choosing a symbol at random, without logic or forethought, is strategically brilliant. Other times, it’s just plain silly.
So they play, nevertheless. Believing whatever it is that they want or need to believe about the efficacy of their strategies, knowing that there is no way to know.
The longer they play together, the more mystical the game becomes.
They play between mind and mindlessness. For the duration of the game, they occupy both worlds. The fun may not feel special, certainly not mystical. But the reality they are sharing is most definitely something that can only be found in play.
How Evaluation Supports Systems Change
An unassuming little article that outlines five key practices that could be the basis of a five-day deep dive into complexity and evaluation. I found this article earlier in the year, and notice that my own practice and attention has come back to these five points over and over.
While evaluation is often conducted as a means to learn about the progress or impact of an initiative, evaluative thinking and continuous learning can be particularly important when working on complex issues in a constantly evolving system. And, when evaluation goes hand in hand with strategy, it helps organizations challenge their assumptions, gather information on the progress, effects, and influence of their work, and see new opportunities for adaptation and change.
When working in complexity, and when trying to create new approaches to things, it’s important to pay attention to ideas that lie outside of the known ways of doing things. These are sometimes called “weak signals” and by their very nature they are hard to hear and see.
At the Participatory Narrative Inquiry Institute, they have been thinking about this stuff. On May 31, Cynthia Kurtz posted a useful blog post on how we choose what to pay attention to:
If you think of all the famous detectives you know of, fictional or real, they are always distinguished by their ability to hone in on signals — that is, to choose signals to pay attention to — based on their deep understanding of what they are listening for and why. That’s also why we use the symbol of a magnifying glass for a detective: it draws our gaze to some things by excluding other things. Knowing where to point the glass, and where not to point it, is the mark of a good detective.
In other words, a signal does not arise out of noise because it is louder than the noise. A signal arises out of noise because it matters. And we can only decide what matters if we understand our purpose.
That is helpful. In complexity, purpose and a sense of direction helps us to choose courses of action from making sense of the data we are seeing to acting on it.
By necessity that creates a narrowing of focus and so paying attention to how weak signals work is alos important. Yesterday the PNI Institute discussed this on a call which resulted in a nice set of observations about the people seeking weka signals an dthe nature of the signals themselves:
We thought of five ways that have to do with the observer of the signal:
- Ignorance – We don’t know what to look for. (Example: the detective knows more about wear patterns on boots than anyone else.)
- Blindness [sic]- We don’t look past what we assume to be true. (No example needed!)
- Disinterest – We don’t care enough about what we’re seeing to look further. (Example: parents understand their toddlers, nobody else does.)
- Habituation – We stopped looking a long time ago because nothing ever seems to change. (Example: A sign changes on a road, nobody notices it for weeks.)
- Unwillingness – It’s too much effort to look, so we don’t. (Example: The “looking for your keys under the street light” story is one of these.)
And we listed five ways a signal can be weak that have to do with the system in which the observer is embedded:
- Rare – It just doesn’t happen often.
- Novel – It’s so new that nobody has noticed it yet.
- Overshadowed – It does happen, but something else happens so much more that we notice that instead.
- Taboo – Nobody talks about it.
- Powerless – Sometimes a signal is literally weak, as in, those who are trying to transmit it have no power.
You can see that this has important implications for building in equity and diversity into sense-making processes. People with different lived experiences, ways of knowing and ways of seeing will pay attention to signals differently. If you are trying to build a group with the increased capacity to scan and make sense of a complex problem, having cognitive and experiential diversity will help you to find many new ideas that re useful in addressing complex problems. Furthermore, you need to pay attention to people whose voices are traditionally quieted in a group so as to amplify their perspectives on powerless signals.
We were working with a local government client last week in a meeting that had a very contentious subject matter focused on the return of land and uses of that land, to First Nations owners. There was an important conversation as a part of this work that involved removing a structure that had some historical significance to the community but was seen as a mark of an oppressive history by the First Nations owners who could not contemplate it remaining on their land. It is a wickedly complicated issue right at the heart of what reconciliation really means: returning land, transferring ownership and working with history.
Our client did an incredible job of preparing multiple stakeholders to participate in this discussion, by meeting each group personally and hearing their thoughts on the situation. All the stakeholders, twenty in total, agreed to come to a two hour dialogue to discuss the issues at hand. Our client put together a beautiful 8 page booklet with much of the technical information in it about proposals and process and sharing some of the things they had heard in the pre-meetings. The format of the day included a presentation from the First Nations about what they were proposing and why, with most of the meeting involving a World Cafe for dialogue.
It went well. We received a couple of really powerful pieces of positive feedback.
These kinds of conversations are the sharp edge of the reconciliation wedge. It is one thing to conduct a brief territorial acknowledgement at the beginning of a meeting or event, it is entirely another for people to sit down and discuss the issues around the return of land.
In debriefing with our client this week, she made the following observations about what contributed to the usefulness of the container for this conversation:
- Very small groups – no more than four at a table – meant that there was no need for people to “take their best shot” as they would have in a larger plenary format. Groups smaller than five reduce the performative nature of conversation and allow dialogue to fully unfold. This enabled people who needed to invest a lot of emotional energy and attention in their speaking and listening, to operate in a more relaxed way.
- The questions for the dialogue were very broad. Sometimes the most powerful question is “what are you thinking and feeling about what you just heard?” This question kicked off 45 minutes of intense learning, listening and story telling at the tables.
- The invitation process is everything. We helped our client design an invitation process but she took the lead in going to each group separately and talking to them about why they were needed in the conversation.
- There were no observers. Everyone in the room was at a table except for me and our graphic recorder. Everyone at a table had a question they needed answered or a curiosity about the outcome. there was no certainty in the room, no positionality, and yet, each person spoke about their own experience and their own perspective and listened carefully to what others said. Also, everyone in the room had to stretch their perspectives to participate. This was not comfortable for anyone, because this work isn’t comfortable for anyone. It is literally unsettling.
- The First Nations leadership pulled no punches in explaining their reasons for their proposal and why it was important that the structure be removed from their lands. This can be a very tricky thing because while it is important for non-indigenous stakeholders to hear First Nations perspectives, there is a tremendous amount of emotional labour involved in talking about traumatizing history. We had one of our own team prepared to talk about the history and emotional legacy of the structure. She had interviewed people from her community and was well positioned to share the rationale but on the day we didn’t need to her to tell the story as the leadership were willing to tell that story themselves. Enabling this to happen well is important.
Reconciliation is nothing without the return of the lands or the influence over the lands which we acknowledge as “unceded territory.” What stops people from going much further than territorial acknowledgement is the fear of being unsettled in the conversation. But we can’t do this work without holding containers that allow for people to be unsettled. Only that way to we share perspectives and find possibilities and to do so in small, deep conversations where stories can be shared, perspectives understood and . Or sometimes not. But the path to reconciliation requires us to try, and these few notes and observations might help in that.
Where I live, on a small island off the west coast of Canada, the traditional Celtic season markers make more sense for our community rhythms and the cycles of our landscape than the solar seasonal calendar, and I’m not as versed in the Skwxwu7mesh seasons well enough to relate to those.
Today is Lughnasa, the traditional commencement of the harvest season. The province of British Columbia is burning in many places, and today the winds have brought us smoke from the interior to colour the sun pink in a grey and orange sky.
The produce in our local markets is showing tremendous diversity, as the brassicas and squashes and fruits that were planted in the spring join the early harvest of greens and peas. On the land and sea, salmon are returning, the deer have dropped their fawns, and already there are signs up for shares in pigs and turkey’s and sheep for the winter.
It’s also a time of harvest for me from a year that has seen much in the way of professional and personal growth. I am moving from a deep study of theory to a deeper informed approach to practice, wanting now to focus my professional craft on simplicity while beginning to think about how to share everything I’ve been learning over the past 8 years or so for the benefit of other practitioners, especially those who are starting out. I am also looking deeply into my own life and where I am on this journey that has delivered 49 years of living and still confounds me.
There are some new learning offerings being planned for this year, including a session on using complexity for social change that I’m doing with Bronagh Gallagher here in Vancouver and over in Glasgow. I’m also preparing an online course with my friends at Beehive Productions on Chaordic Design. Add to that two Art of Hosting workshops in November: our 14th annual offering here on Bowen Island and one in Amsterdam with old friends. These are all harvests for me.